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"For the memories themselves
are still nothing. Not till they have turned to blood within us."

—Rainer Maria Rilke

1.

At first the letters were a forest
without paths,

Branch upon branch, thorn against
thorn,

Then the next-door grandpa taught
me tricks:

Two lines for a man, three for a
stream,

Four for a water drop bursting the
evening pond.

For others I invented names

To make my little brother laugh:

Man standing to pee, momma killing
a chicken.

Strange characters began to tell a
story.

This was my twelfth year.

You want to know about the war?

My tale is short: Bad stars fell.

The rich left town. The poor were
left.

December was too cold to weep.

2.

Why
tell you memories are a forest without paths: screams and knee against thigh
the corpses piled breast upon belly and the smell of iron? Why tell you
yesterday's flesh today blue curves and angles squint tight your eyes try not
to read the message of their bayonets and burns? Why tell you the knocking door
squinting my eyes curving my angles trying not to hear my ripping flesh an
ocean without bottom?

You
would drown too.

Why
tell you the empty box by the kitchen door the too-much roar of bombs the
shattering of shutters? Tell you the piss the scrubbing of shirts the fallen
rice poured out into the jagged emptiness broken street? Tell you a single
finger in the dirt the ragged join of leg and hip laid bare the hang of tendon
crunch of bone? Tell you the row of naked feet by the river backwards swing of
a noose?

You
would hang too.

Tell
you strange new craters of his face after the bullet and a trunkless head black
hair turned dull staring from a red platter on the gray street? Tell you ragged
skirt hems hacking at hairless napes skin wrenched from the red muscle one
liquid breath before death? The night of broken doors little brother with a
stick man with a club tongues without music barking and inside out their skins
made wolves of their hearts guzzled our breath for warmth?

You
would get eaten too.

3.

Now the next-door grandpa doesn't
speak.

Little brother wakes too soon.

Two lines for a man.

I used to like that shape.

I throw my pencils on the fire

and how beautifully they burn.

You learned it well—to remember is
to burn.

Our memories are ashes and blood

letters without meaning

forests without paths

legs without feet

this pain asks

a question

with no

Note: Minnie Vautrin (1886-1941)
was the missionary, educator and president of Ginling College, Nanjing, who
protected thousands of Chinese citizens from Japanese soldiers during the 1937
Rape of Nanjing. Iris Chang (1968-2004) was the journalist who documented the
Nanjing atrocities and brought them to prominence in her 1991 bestseller The Rape of Nanking. Both women ended
their lives by committing suicide.

SECOND PRIZE ($400)

Nanking: A Child’s Memory

Shelby Song, San Francisco, CA

At the foot of the osmanthus hill by the walled city
of Nanking,

Once the realm of emperors, princes and concubines,

A little girl was born.

She had dimples as cute as buttons

And a full head of hair the color of the shiniest
inkstone.

But her mother sighed,

Her father sighed,

Her great aunt sighed,

“Why do you have to be born a girl?

And why now, in this dreadful year of 1934?

Warlords have been fighting all around us,

The Japanese army has bombed our store in Manchuria,

We are war refugees in Nanking,

We are barely making ends meet,

A boy would at least carry on our family name,

But a girl is but an extra mouth to feed.

But feed her they did,

And nurture her they did,

With whatever little they had,

And with whatever vices they possessed,

For who could resist those dimples as cute as
buttons,

Hair the color of the shiniest inkstone.

They taught her to sing, they taught her to dance,

They taught her to write with a wolf-haired writing
brush.

She was the apple of her great aunt’s eye,

She was a delight of her village.

The world was her great aunt smothering her with
cuddles after emerging from the haze of the opium den.

The world was her mother squeezing her on her cheeks
after collecting her winnings at the mahjong hall.

The world was her wading in the river with playmates
searching for the speckled river stones

And the world was the warplanes whirring in the
distance.

They say children under three don’t remember,

But she remembered, and she remembered well.

She remembered the ineffable fear of the villagers
crying out that Shanghai had fallen and Nanking would soon too.

She remembered the haggard eyes of the retreating
Chinese soldiers banging on their doors, begging for food and water, their
blood-soaked bandages dangling.

She remembered the deafening throb of the artillery

and the thunderous thrust of the canon fire that
silenced all thrushes, robins, magpies, crickets, frogs and the wailing of
babies.

and painted the blue sky scarlet red.

She remembered her great aunt begging her young
mother to go and hide, her voice trembling in subdued anguish.

She remembered being carried on the back of her
father, passing by corpse after corpse, severed limb after severed limb, as
they trudged along in search of food at the local temple.

She remembered the deathly silence of the crowd when
the soldiers came, soldiers in uniforms she had never seen, soldiers with the
flag of the rising sun fluttering on their bayonets

Even sniveling babies dared not cry.

She remembered the soldier telling those wretched
souls crowding the temple that anyone who had contracted malaria must be
brought forth.

She remembered her great aunt whispering to her,
“Child, if the Japanese come to you, be still, be very, very still.”

She remembered the muffled howls of parents whose
malaria-infected children or those who merely looked jaundiced were taken away,
the lucky ones shot, the rest cut down with bayonets and sabers.

She remembered the scrawny solider coming to her,
his cold, cold sword glistening in the chilly December sun.

She remained still, deathly still, as her teeth
chattered, her tiny face drained of blood.

She remembered the soldier’s cold, cold stare, and
her great aunt’s lips quivering in the wintry blast.

“Sir, she does not have malaria. Look at her, she is
one healthy, healthy child.”

It’s not on the cultural radar as are the Japanese
cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It lacks the prestige of nuclear annihilation.
The Chinese in Nanking died, and nobody denies it, but their deaths lack nuclear
glamour.

History moves on and the criminals get away. That’s
harsh, that’s rude,

but that’s the way it is. The Americans didn’t push
prosecutions after the war

and very soon the guilty and the victims were
forgotten.

For many, forgiveness is easy. Give the Japanese a
break, some say, forget it.

Time to move on, but the crime of genocide doesn’t
disappear; death by

Imperial fanatics doesn’t just go away. It stays.

The Americans and the Japanese cooked up the myth of
the peace-loving Japanese after the war. It was the propagandists’ way to
defeat the rise of communism. Suddenly, the enemy had become a new friend.

Instead of blood-thirsty killers, the Japanese were
depicted as innocent victims and peace-lovers. “We would never do a thing like
that!” and the world chose to believe them. Nanking was dropped from the
cultural radar.

Nobody wants vengeance. It is time to move on, but
it will never be time to forget. We must take a good hard look at history.
Nanking was a death capital as terrifying as Dresden, as ghastly as Buchenwald.
What happened there was no accident.

The murderers in Nanking looked their victims in the
eye and stabbed them in the heart. They were as heartless as the American
bombers, but they didn’t just look down and push a button, as they did over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

They murdered with relentless determination and with
sadistic glee. They stabbed pregnant women and chopped up infants. They shot
men between the eyes. They drove over living victims; it was a killing spree.

Nobody wants vengeance but we must all take an oath
of remembrance. It is time to move on, they say, and we agree, but we must
never forget it. There can be no healing without justice. These deaths haunt
the present.

We demand nothing more than recognition, an
acknowledgment of responsibility, not even an apology, just sincere regret.
This war is over. We are ready to shake hands. We’ll never forget but we can
move on. Nobody wants vengeance.

I read Wilhelmina “Minnie” Vautrin’s (an American
missionary in charge of Ginling College in Nanjing) diaries throughout the
period of the fall of Nanjing, and was overwhelmed by her first person account.
I majored in history, so I was 100% true to her actual words. Where I used only
partial sentences, I inserted ellipses.
jo@nycsmith.com